Now, you don't have to share my philosophy. If you know your paste has a short shelf life or isn't relevant to the net at large, just paste it privately. Pastie has supported this for a long time now (and it seems quite popular).

July 09, 2010

I'm pulling a Duncan Davidson and going to start posting more on Tumblr. Typepad just feels too big and slow sometimes. By the time I pull it up, login, navigate to my blog, find the new post page... the urge to post has passed. The Typepad quick post feature is kind of nice but doesn't let me do quite enough.

Already Tumblr has encouraged me to post more often (and queue things up). I hope it'll encourage me to share more of my photography as well.

June 24, 2010

May 15, 2010

Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

March 02, 2010

I can’t speak to the hardware and “architecture” issues, but I despise the idea of “user interface” patents.

I've oftenlamented how sad it is to see everyone trying to copyright their "look and feel". I've clearly pointed out that you'd really have to patent such things to have any type of legal protection. Not that I'm suggesting these companies start patenting their app's "look and feel". I agree with Gruber that you should not be able to protect such things. It stifles innovation.

And, yes, I intend to keep harping on this periodically until said companies (they know who they are) get their heads out of their asses about copyright. They're welcome to read my lengthy article on the subject in their quest for understanding. :-)

Want to learn more?

If you're interested in learning more on the subject you can read my entire Design Piracy Series (start at the bottom) where I tear this silly "my web app look and feel is copyright me" argument to pieces.

February 01, 2010

Wil Shipley talking about how the iPad iBooks app design is a copy of Delicious Library:

Although Delicious Library was the first to do it, we didn't try to copyright the idea of wooden shelves, or of showing books photo-realistically...

Not that you can copyright ideas in the first place. :-) But I like the overall attitude he goes on to reveal in what he says a bit later:

As a creator, part of what I seek is recognition, immortality. I don't work for Apple, or Google (I've been offered jobs & buyouts) because I want the fame myself. It's my shot at immortality. My designs are my children. So it stinks when I feel like Steve might get the fame for my innovation. I lose my children, as it were.

But your children aren't really yours. They have lives of their own. So when your designs do change the world, you have to accept it. You have to say, 'Ok, this was such a good idea, other people took it and ran with it. I win.

December 09, 2009

Not sure how helpful this will be for anyone, but I just learned way more than I wanted to know about how f#$%ed up hard drives can be. I just upgraded my 15" MBP with a brand new Western Digital 500gig Scorpio Blue drive and installed Snow Leopard. Previously my Leopard install had 9x% filled my previous 320gig drive and I'm sure it was fragmented to pieces. It was slow.

Now it's wonderful and fast... except sometimes it would randomly "lag".

Beach ball for half a second while using Propane with no load

Occasional strange lag after hitting enter or doing random stuff like scrolling a window in Safari (again with the system otherwise bored).

Maybe I'm ultra sensitive to my responsiveness, but it was very frustrating. It "felt" a lot like the hard drive was spinning down and I was waiting for it to spin back up. Writing a quick Ruby script to keep the hard drive busy writing tiny bits of data seemed to help, but that was no solution.

Finally I took the bottom part of my case off to listen to the drive... and it was parking the heads every 5-10 seconds. It would get quiet, spin up, get quiet, spin up, turn off (sounded like it), spin up again... craziness.

I'll save you the rest of my research and just share what I've learned:

General consensus across the net seems to be that several hundred thousand load counts are bad. PDF specs for my new drive list 600,000 load/unload cycles.

If you see a reason to tune this you can use hdapm (and set it to load on boot).

Yes, I played with OS X's built in sleep settings. No, they had no effect.

Some people blame Mac OS X's built in power management, that it doesn't put all drives in the "right" APM mode... and claim that the same drive on Windows exhibits different behavior. I can't confirm or deny this, but if so it would be really annoying that OS X isn't doing the "right" thing here.

My 85 hour "New" Western Digital Drive

That's loading/unloading 162 times per hour! Or less than half a year to reach the drives rated spec of 600,000 load/unload cycles.

160gb Seagate Drive in my 2 year old 17" MBP

Loading/unloading 85 times per hour. One million load/unload cycles and counting. Funny thing is I've never noticed any performance problems on this system. Perhaps the half reduction makes a big difference in actual everyday use?

Summary

I'm just informing here. I'm not saying telling you to rush to check your drives (but if you do, share your findings!) or get all in a frenzy. I'm not saying that a load count of 1,000,000 is for sure beyond your drives capacity.

I found enough lunatics online raving about S.M.A.R.T. stats without ANY comprehension of them to join that crowd. I don't imagine that just because I already knew what SMART was and spent 30 minutes reading a few web pages that I'm now a SMART expert. However...

I had a performance problem with my new drive. I solved it by altering the power management settings with hdapm. I'm now much happier. :-)

If anyone knows more about this subject that I do and wants to share, it'd be greatly appreciated!

Perl, Java, or C# more your style?

If you aren't a fan of the default Ruby on Rails language setting you might be happy to know Pastie now supports passing your language of choice as a parameter. This should make it easier to bookmark Pastie ready-to-go for your favorite language.

Today I added C# support to Pastie. I used the C# bundle referenced from this blog post. It seems to at least cover the basics. I would include some attribution here but have no idea who I should be giving the thanks to.